


The Faces of Death

by DdraigCoch



Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Community: contrelamontre, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-10
Updated: 2010-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-11 15:56:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DdraigCoch/pseuds/DdraigCoch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Timeline: Pre-Blackwood Farm, Post-Merrick</p><p>Written for the contrelamontre Death challenge in 80mins</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Faces of Death

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: Pre-Blackwood Farm, Post-Merrick
> 
> Written for the contrelamontre Death challenge in 80mins

  
Not many people live to remember their deaths. Humans were never meant to survive the process of the body's death, that process of shutting down all the functions needful to life. I did. So did we all, but each of out deaths are personal to us and shared only with the one that caused it. I shared my first death with Lestat, there on the stairs where my brother had died also, in the house that bore my family name.  
It is little more than a haze to me now, centuries later. I remember only a little more than what I admitted to in my book where all secrets were revealed I suppose. But I do remember looking up along that row of enthrallingly shiny buttons to his face and wondering at the smile I saw there. It was only the briefest of smiles, and perhaps had no more substance to it than the cold breeze that caressed my skin where his arms had been. But, if it was real and not only a figment of my imagination or a trick of memory, then it was worth the pain of cramps and the sting of dignity as I hid at the side of the house until my bowels no longer needed any control, and never would again.

Recently we both thought to make ourselves grand sacrifices to the Sun from the darkness that fostered us, and gave us this power to live within a walking corpse. He was rejected by the sun, and has felt the sting of that rejection. I however was made a corpse once more.  
It took all of my courage to do it, and even then I had to hide myself away with my maker for three days. I spoke to Lestat in those three days as I hadn't since those first days of my making when we walked in the indigo fields. Only now his smile was gone, and he did not walk besides me but lay immobile, lifeless on the bed. In those days he was fond of touching my hair or my cheek to feel for himself their changing substance. Once he stopped us and kissed me softly where cheek and lips meet, then stepped back to laugh at us both, at the night or perhaps just to hear his own laughter. For three nights I held the Brat Prince's vigil, and remembered old times when we fought, the times when we'd work together to make Claudia smile, the brief time after the Akasha incident when we were lovers and all those times we'd betrayed each other. Such a long time to spend in someone's company, even after death.  
For three nights I stayed there, and when the day came I would lay down next to him until the death sleep came and turned us into monumental angels, injured and unable to protect the devil's road anymore. On the third night, before dawn I left him to return to the Rue Royal. I like to think that when I said the goodbye I meant to be final and bent down to kiss his dusty lips that he responded to that. Just a flicker of his eyes, and a tiny, sly smile.  
I remember more of my second death, as though my first were merely preparation for this. I remember clearly the agonising pain as my blood turned to flames inside me, of being unable to move during those hours and the brief relief as my spirit slipped free of my body sometime later. What came after I told no one but Lestat, who had seen the whirlwind of souls himself, although he'd never been caught in it. He did not know the feeling of purgatory's winds ripping through your very self, stealing bit by bit your life. But they didn't take him from me. They tried, but they couldn't take away the cold gold of his hair in the moonlight, or the memory of old hatred or that first, tentive smile.  
Lestat's Ordinary Man couldn't take him from my memory, so he sent me back to the corpse that was by then only a peculiarly well carved charcoal brickett. Even then there was pain. Even as the blood fell on me, nourished me, there was pain. There was the pain of rebirth, of reanimation even when strong arms in dusty shirt sleeves pulled me up towards the waiting vein.  
Later, Lestat walked about the flat with me until we had seen every antique filled corner of it. We did not walk as we used to. There was no conversation, and we both had so little energy for it that it was a relief when he drew me down onto one of the sofas so we could rest against each other. We did exchange blood there, while the fledglings we both know will die one day fed and gloried in life. But that did not seem so important at the time. More important had been his hand in my hair, my nose nuzzling against his harder flesh.  
We won't die again for some time, I think. There will be time enough for us to gather our strength and take up our flaming swords to guard the Devil's road once more. There will be time enough for us to walk about the world, together.


End file.
